Passing

It is again November. The fourth November since Maxx's death. I say death because I don't believe he "passed" anywhere. He died.

When I was 32 , a year before Maxx was born, Steve, Megan, then 3, and I lived in a cramped two bedroom duplex in Alhambra. One afternoon in late May of 1985, my mother, who had been gravely ill for almost four years with metastasized breast cancer, had collapsed on the kitchen floor of her apartment about 40 minutes away in San Pedro. The 62 year old divorcee who lived directly beneath my parents in a two bedroom carbon copy flat, heard the sudden dull thud of her fall as my mother stood at the counter pouring hot water for a cup of tea. The neighbor rushed upstairs. Later, that same woman who, by the way, ended up marrying my father not quite two years after my mother died, liked to "thank god" that she had been at home and not out as she usually was at that time of day performing her rigorous roster of pastoral duties as an ordained minister of the Unity Church. Wasn't it lucky that she hadn't yet left and so could be with my mother while she "transitioned?"

Sitting on the kitchen floor, in a puddle of Earl Gray holding my mother's hand, waiting for the ambulance that would take her to the hospital where she died several days later.

"What luck that I was there with her, or she would have been entirely alone," she would comment at every opportunity eying me like a scrappy nasty tempered plucked parrot.

"You know, Lis, (she liked to use my family nickname without ever asking me) sometimes your mom would just sit there in the kitchen and bang on the floor to have me come up and help her put on her bra when your father was gone." My mother would never have done such a thing. Like some kind of caged chimpanzee.

I never stopped hating this woman even though she took good care of my father for the next 20 years, until he "transitioned" a year ago from Alzheimer's. She also assisted him in "transitioning" through his comfortable pension and is now living on whatever he left her in his will. Honestly, he was a bastard and she did me a favor.

Before she used the word in this context--to somehow soften the gut-wrenching details associated with the slow disintegration of the physical and emotional body--I had never heard this phrase and so was both aghast and horrified at the banality of the statement. "Transitioned?" Into what? Where? Having had no prior experience with death, or those who hovered at its edges, I had no idea at the time what the term meant, Apparently, this is what was (maybe still is) said when someone loses consciousness and "passes over."

In any case, Maxx did not pass. He died. Four Thanksgiving's ago. Four Halloween's. Four Christmas's. This week I have come apart. Megan spoke of cellular memory. I have heard the phrase and I understand it's meaning. This does not stop the shock that I register at the force with which it takes me down.

It is the change in seasons. The color of the light in the sky. The early chill in the evening. The darkness at 5:00 pm. The need to dress more warmly. A time when I used to begin buying warm socks and sweatshirts, hats and another umbrella. Now, these are just the days I crawl through to get to December 6th.

They are vaguely defined "people," and I used to be a nameless one among them. Accepting and accepted, they live with one another beneath that light, and whether it lasts forever or for a moment, there must be a kind of closeness while they are enveloped in the light. I am no longer one of them, however. They are up there, on the face of the earth; I am down here, in the bottom of a well. They possess the light, while I am in the process of losing it. Sometimes I feel that I may never find my way back to that world, that I may never again be able to feel the peace of being enveloped in the light, that I may never again be able to hold the cat's soft body in my arms. and then I feel a dull ache in the chest, as if something inside there is being squeezed to death."
Haruki Murakami
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle

Other

One of the things that happens when one loses a child is that our brains become "other." However we were used to thinking of ourselves, our loved ones, the rest of the world, vanishes. The familiarity, the subtle comfort we experienced in and around our ways of being alive, are extinguished. The circuits between our thoughts are broken. We are shockingly dissociated from our very selves. We are dissolved, disappeared. Not only had my son "been taken," but now, in this darkness I discovered that my own mind was gone. No longer safely contained within the loving confines of a structure called "my family," surrounded by the familiar irritations and joys of being alive, I was in a wasteland where anything and everything could attack, and did. Where previously there had existed miles of carefully constructed breastworks behind which I could take shelter, trenches into which I could dive, now I was hurtling into space, freed by my son's death to know the terror of an illusory reality blown to bits. I was undone. And into the vacuum created by his absence rushed every possibility for unraveling, finally and forever.


My mind would not stop. It does not stop, even now. The rush of despair brought with it every raw option for dissolution. I am not speaking of suicide, though I did, and sometimes still do, examine closely the choice for a final severance. Rather, there is the shock beyond the loss of Maxx, of losing myself to myself and all the destruction that entails. The breaking down of every single, conceivable knowing that defined me to me. This deconstruction continues.


I live in this body. I am 59. My hair is gray. My waist is thick. My skin is dry. My back hurts. My hips, left knee, jaw and neck crack when I move. I used to eat fish several times a week. I need to have my teeth cleaned. I have a job, a husband, a 30 year old daughter. We have two dogs. I like one, but not the other. I need to dust and clean the bathroom. I have a dead son who would have been 25 this past August.


All of this is real. But there is the other reality that exists; just there, in the space where Maxx should be. The door that flew open at his death stands ajar but it is not my son with his young man's lanky body, the palpable scent of energy, impatience, hope, simmering exuberance whose bursting aliveness fills its frame. It is only a faint shadow, an outline, a transparency through which all of everything, all of nothing can be glimpsed. The edges of a once sharp future now faded into the white-blue of an endless gaping sky.


I am in the hurricane of thought, unable to configure the raging into a cohesive ethic according to which I can live, or even die. Everything is real. Nothing is real.


Grief does that. It is a force as powerful as the cancer that killed my son.


The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were torn-down men. they had an intimate understanding of man's vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it. They carried unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation, and an acute sense of vulnerability that attended the knowledge of how readily they could be disarmed and dehumanized. Many felt lonely and isolated, having endured abuses that ordinary people couldn't understand. Their dignity had been obliterated, replaced with a pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness. And they had the caustic knowledge that no one had come between them and tragedy. Coming home was an experience of profound, perilous aloneness.

For these men, the central struggle of postwar life was to restore their dignity and find a way to see the world as something other than menacing blackness. There was no one right way to peace; every man had to find his own path, according to his own history. Some succeeded. For others, the war would never really end. Some retreated into brooding isolation or lost themselves in escapes. And for some men, years of swallowed rage, terror, and humiliation concentrated into what Holocaust survivor Jean Amery would call a "seething, purifying thirst for revenge."
Barbara Hillenbrand
"Unbroken"